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Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Fresh steak from one of gaming's sacred cows

Magical healing. For some reason it takes a team of local priests a whole week to heal up a powerful character from minor damage in some systems, while a near dead peasant can be fully healed with excess to spare in a few seconds.

Part of the "Luck Point" system used by Piecemeal is that it actually defines what "taken damage" is. In the context of Magical healing this allows for a more rational way characters are affected by spells.

Without getting into the nature of luck and body points (another post), you gain so many Luck Points back (think of them as HP) per level. Thus a low level (say level 2) character healed for a d4 points, would get the result of that roll per level (aka 4 points back) while a high level character (say level 7) would gain proportionally more (in this case 14).

Why is this good?

1.) I reduces the need for every party to have a healer, or an army of NPC priests.2.) It keeps priests miracles powerful at high levels, without being able to "Spam" a medieval city with healing, to the point that death and serious injury no longer really exist. This is further reinforced by the Piecemeal system of Priest Miracles, but that too is another post.3.) Healing potions never become "obsolete" or "not worth the encumbrance". The same potion that could save your life at first level could be just as valuable at 10th.

Note that when using this with other systems, you obviously want to re-arrange the dice involved in healing spells. 3d8 is no longer required, a simple step up of die sizes may be more useful (ie, d2 up to d12). Thoughts?

Unrelated News: As per requests I'm working on upping the font size in Piecemeal by 50%, just wrestling with newly formed layout issues.